There is an old story, told in a thousand voices, across a thousand epochs.

It is the story of love as a singular path, a singular devotion, a singular undoing. It is the story of the one great love that devours all others, that demands everything in return. In these stories, love is a knife: You cut away what demarcated before from now, you carve out a space in your chest, and you offer yourself to the fire.

We have been told that if love is real, it must be all-consuming. That to step into a love that shakes the very foundation of our being, we must leave behind all that we were prior to its arrival. That love is a portal through which only one version of ourselves—the one robust enough to become the last one standing—may pass.

But there is another story, one that has been murmuring through the cracks of time, waiting for the ones bold enough in their listening to remember it.

It is a story that does not end in exile. It is a story that does not demand erasure. It is the story of love as an ever-growing landscape—wild, untamable, fecund with new life forms. All in all, limitless.

The Old Myth: Love as Trial, Fire, Severance

The old myths demand proof: of devotion, of sacrifice, of the idea that love is more than a passing wind.

And how do you prove love? You cut off the past. You forsake what was. You stand in the ashes of your old life and call it transformation.

We have seen this story before.

• The mystic who renounces all they have built—their art, their home, their community—to chase a transcendent love they trust will initiate them into a higher state of being…only to woefully discover that they were meant to birth their love into the world, not escape from it.
• The wanderer who belongs everywhere and nowhere, slipping between identities, cultures, and selves, but never quite finding the place where they can rest—until they are forced to ask if home was ever meant to be limited to a single place at all.
• The poet who erases every past version of themselves for the sake of passion, believing that in order to be chosen, they must first be rendered unrecognizable to themselves.
• The warrior who believes love must be proven through sacrifice, surrendering their softness, their tenderness—offering only their strength, never realizing they were meant to be adored in all their iterations.
• The oracle who sees their future written in the eyes of another but assumes fate demands that they leave behind their history, their sacred ground…as if devotion cannot unfurl from familiar soil.
• The lovers who believe they must flee to consummate their passion, that love is only real if it is forged in exile, never questioning whether they might have built a new world right where they stood…not from the ashes of their old lives, but from the raw, undiluted truth of who they have always been—and from the courage to be fully seen and known.

We, the children of these stories, have inherited the belief that to step into newness and possibility, we must destroy what came before. That love is a house that cannot hold more than one story at a time. That love is a blade, rather than a bridge. That love is a cage, rather than an open sky.

But what if the old myths were wrong? Or rather—what if they were only half the truth?

A New Myth: Love as Expansion, Not Wound

There is another way. A way where love is not a door that locks behind you, but a horizon that stretches forward into infinity. A way where new love does not demand the sacrifice of the old, but uses it as the substrate upon which to build new possibilities and cultivate new seeds. A way where the heart does not shrink to accommodate a single devotion, but grows to make space for glorious uncontainability.

To love in this way is to refuse the decree for destruction. It is to say:

• I will not exile myself from what I have built, just because something new calls me forward.
• I will not turn love into a trade—this for that, past for future, one desire for another.
• I will not trust in the lie that devotion requires scarcity, that love is real only when it is singular and containable.

This is not an easy story to tell. After all, the world trafficks in binaries. The world trusts a stable hearth more than it trusts a blazing comet. Because the world does not know how to hold a love that does not writhe beneath an ultimatum, bow beneath a summons, or bleed beneath a reckoning.

But what if our collective imagination is asking us to stretch into a new truth? One that declares:

• A love that asks you to shrink is not love at all. It is fear disguised as kindness.
• A love that demands exile instead of expansion is not love—it is a mistrust of vastness disguised as concern.
• A love that forces you to choose between the vows that shaped you and the portal that calls you forward is not love—it is control that calls itself righteousness. True love does not sever; it expands, making room for both the roots and the horizon, for what has been vowed and what has yet to unfold.

The Fear That Holds Us Captive

Why do we fear the new myth that love is asking us to breathe into being? Because we have been told that to hold more than one love, more than one devotion, more than one truth, is selfish. Because we have been told that if love does not come with sacrifice, it is not real. Because we secretly believe that if we allow ourselves to expand, we will become too vast and peculiar for the world to know what to do with.

But is this fear the voice of love? Or is it the susurration of scarcity dressed in fidelity, the tightening hand that mistakes its grip for grace?

We have learned love from a world that detests its own complexity, that measures the heart in rations, that warns: Take in too much, and you will drown; you will fracture; you will be lost.

But love is not an economy. It is not a careful tally of what is owed and what is spared. Love is the cosmos spilling over itself, a star collapsing and birthing a thousand more. Love is the river that carves new paths in the dark, never asking if it is permitted. Love is the wilderness that does not demand you forget the road behind you, but dares you to detour into the darkness—with everything, with all of it, with all of you.

What It Means to Love Without Erasure

To love without erasure is to live in the impossible vastness of the in-between. It is to cherish what you have built, without fearing what is still unfolding. It is to step into the arms of something new—something that augurs the unfolding of your most primal hidden truths—without burning down the home that sheltered you as you incubated in the womb of initiation. It is to say yes to fire, without concern that it will consume you whole. (It will, but you'll come out all the better for it.)

This is not a love that the old myths comprehend or have given adequate language to, beyond the binaries that hold our imaginations captive. But it is a love that exists, waiting for those who are bold enough to step beyond the edge of the known map.

The Strength to Expand

To love in this way is not easy. It requires a strength beyond certainty. Because it means holding paradox without trying to resolve it. It means trusting love’s infinitude, even when the world tells you it must be quashed to ensure safe passage. It means rambling into the unknown—not with a torch to burn the past, but with open hands to greet the sacred unknown.

And perhaps that is what this moment in time is beckoning us toward. Not a love that demands exile. Not a love that trades one version of the self for another. Not a love that forces us to choose. But a love that is large enough to hold everything. A love that refuses the old maps and fashions a new myth by threading together all the directions. A love that does not end in destruction, but in widening—until the heart itself becomes a universe, large enough to hold both the roots and the sky. A love that is not a cage. But a new world, waiting to be made through our longing and our liberation.

There are those who come into the world to bring light, to open doors, to remind others of what they have forgotten. And there are those who, upon seeing this light, try to fix it in place—to name it, to worship it, to build walls around it and call it a temple.

But the ones who truly carry the fire are not meant to be tethered.

This is the paradox of the liminal ones, the wanderers, the threshold dwellers, those who belong equally to the seen and the unseen. They are called forward to awaken something, to stir embers, to remind people of what already lives inside them. But they are not meant to become the altar where others kneel, mistaking devotion for their own awakening.

And yet, the world loves to build shrines and pedestals. It loves to take a luminous thread and pin it to the sky, demanding that it remain in the place where others found it—never shifting, never slipping beyond reach (despite the gradual, cyclic wobble of the Earth's rotation, known as the precession of equinoxes...which will always cause the seemingly constant stars to shift and drift over time).

When the Role Becomes the Cage

For those who have spent their lives learning to listen at the threshold of mystery, who have honed their ability to step into the unseen, there comes a moment of reckoning: when others stop seeing them as a traveler and start seeing them as a destination.

The role of the spiritual teacher, the guide, the seer, can become a binding, a constriction, a slow erosion of freedom.

Because what was meant to be fluid, what was meant to move, what was meant to come and go like the changing tides, is now expected to remain. To mire itself in consistency, to be accessible, to be available for consumption.

The truth we seldom name, because it feels so counterintuitive, is that being pedestalized is synonymous with being objectified. To be named a teacher is to be trapped inside a title that leaves no space for evolution and uncertainty.

To be revered is to be confined.

And the moment a person stops being perceived as a participant in the great unfolding and is instead calcified into a keeper of truth, something is lost. Truth is not meant to be kept—it is meant to be discovered, lost, then rediscovered. It is meant to be lived, breathed, danced with, unraveled, dispersed.

The Hunger to Possess and Fear of the Wild

Why does the world struggle to let the liminal ones remain in their movement, their paradox, their wildness?

Because to the world, fluidity is terrifying—it unmoors the fixed, blurs the edges, queers the certainty that power depends upon. It refuses the singular, the binary, the ordained and orthodox path. It is the lover who will not be named, the current that will not be dammed, the presence that slips between definitions and asks: What if there was never one way, one truth, one shape to hold us all?

A teacher who does not stay in one place cannot be controlled. A fire that moves cannot be claimed.

And yet, the world is ravenous for certainty—for anchors in the quicksand, for figures who hold their shape when everything else dissolves. It hungers for those who speak in declaratives, who make the fog seem like a curtain rather than a climate. We long for voices that say, "This is the way." We are not passive fools thirsty for salvation...but we are weary. Because the tectonics of modern life—ecological collapse, social fragmentation, digital deluge—have left us dizzy with options and stumbling for sacred ground.

We reach, then, for those who do not flinch, who offer blueprints instead of excruciatingly clear mirrors. We yearn for the ones who promise clarity, even if it costs us our complexity. We canonize stillness not for its truth, but for its comfort. And yet, what we call stability is often just a refusal to dance. The soul, by contrast, is a moving target. So is truth. Still, who can blame the seeker for wanting someone to hold the lantern steady while the path vanishes beneath their feet?

Those who dwell in the liminal do not offer certainty. They offer fire—volatile, illuminating, alive. Fire doesn’t stay where it’s placed. It moves, devours, reshapes. Those who walk with it often vanish before anyone can decide what they were.

The trouble begins when wisdom becomes confused with a role. When the mystic is expected to be a mystic at all times, when the teacher is asked to stand still so the lesson doesn’t waver, something essential is misplaced. The figure becomes a function. The offering becomes a requirement.

Those who remember—the ones who touch the edge of the veil and return—may speak, but their value doesn’t rest in being followed. Holding the torch can be beautiful, but when asked to hold it endlessly, the hand begins to burn. Wisdom resists possession. It flares up in one, then another. It wants movement, transmission, relinquishment. It doesn't mean to be elusive, but it does mean to be alive.

The Freedom to Come and Go

The truest teachers are the ones who do not demand devotion, for they do not mistake their own insights for immutable truth. They will be the first to say: “I will give you everything I have. And then I will leave. And you will still have it.”

These are the ones who move between—sojourners of the threshold, tethered not to arrival but to the rhythm of return. They belong to the road as much as to any resting place, and even their pauses carry the scent of departure. Reverence slips off their shoulders; they never linger long enough to be turned into idols. Their movement is not a summons to follow them, but a quiet invitation to trace the thread of one’s own remembering.

What we don’t need are more idols cast in algorithmic stone—more self-appointed oracles mistaking performance for presence. In a time when every platform turns opinion into doctrine, we are flooded with voices offering closure instead of inquiry, allegiance instead of attention. The hunger for certainty has made gatekeepers of many, but few know how to kneel at the threshold of real mystery. In an age where everyone performs wisdom, shouting over the silence that births it, what’s rare is the one who invites wonder without demanding attention. Certainty makes noise. Gnosis listens.

The ones the world calls down arrive in motion. They stir the air and vanish before the story settles. No monument marks their passing, but a trace of them lingers—a tension in the chest, a phrase that won’t let go. Their gift lives in the residue as a kind of permission, quiet but electric. Armor loosens. The voice grows honest. Movement begins in the body long before it finds a name.

These aren’t leaders to follow or flames to circle around. Their presence leaves a different quality—an opening, a rhythm, a question.

The ember waits in you now. The memory breathes through your ribs. The next gesture is yours to make.

For centuries, the oracle has been imagined as a passive conduit—a woman in a trance, a seer frothing through the mouth and overcome by uncontrollable visions, a mouthpiece through which a vast and ineffable divine (usually prefigured as masculine) speaks. The oracle is often revered but removed, a figure who surrenders to the will of forces beyond her control. She does not shape the prophecy; she merely delivers it.

But this is an incomplete story. Because to channel is not to be erased. To be a medium is not to dissolve into the ineffable void. To be an oracle is not to be filled like an empty vessel.

The truth is far stranger. Far wilder.

Not a Receiver—A Frequency

There is a persistent canard that oracles are simply receivers—that they pick up transmissions like a radio tuned to the right station. That the message exists somewhere else, fully formed, waiting for a worthy body to deliver it.

But the ones who know—the real seers, the real translators of the unseen— will tell you this is not how it works.

The oracle is not just a receiver. The oracle is the frequency itself.

What moves through you is not separate from you. It is not a foreign voice whispering into your ear, dictating truths that do not belong to you. It is your own resonance, your own being, vibrating in a way that allows the liminal to take form inside your particular embodiment.

You are not just a listener. You are a summoner. You are a translator of what you have already known, in the part of you that remembers that which precedes memory.

The world tells you that the unseen must come from elsewhere—from a god, from a spirit, from an external source. But the world is wrong. Because what comes is not bestowed. It is evoked. It is embodied.

You are not an empty vessel waiting to be filled. You are a river with its own current. You are the flood that carves its own path, and the tide that answers only to the cosmic body that governs it.

Channeling: Or, Speaking in Your Own Tongue

It’s another lie that to channel is to become neutral. That to speak prophecy means to step aside, to let something other take over, to become a pure, untouched conduit through which the message flows unimpeded. But the truth is that nothing comes through you without passing through your own tongue, your own imagery, your own rhythm.

This is why oracles do not all speak in the same voice. This is why the language of the unseen is shaped by the one who speaks it. The words that come to you carry the cadence of your own being. The images that arise draw from the wellspring of your own knowing. The prophecy is woven from your own resonance.

You do not vanish in the act of receiving. You transmute what comes. You shape it. You give it form in a way that only you can.

To be an oracle is not to disappear. It is to become more fully and visibly yourself, to recognize that what is moving through you is not separate from you. It is to stop questioning whether it is real and start asking: "What will I do with what I have been given?"

The Oracle of This Time Must Refuse the Pedestal

There is another reason people misunderstand the oracle: They want her to be a fixed radiance in a firmament that is constantly in flux.

The world fears the ones who do not stay in place. The ones who move between, who come and go, who refuse to be pinned to a singular role. The world wants the oracle to be static, enshrined, trapped in the shape of a teacher, a guide, an authority with a thundering voice that booms out certainty.

But the oracle does not belong on a pedestal. The pedestal is no great privilege. The moment you are enshrined, you are contained. 

This is why the true oracle of today must refuse fixity. She must be fluid. She must be open. She must be the fire that moves, not the idol moored to worship. Thus, the oracle must refuse to be the "source" that others hold onto in place of their own remembering.

For the oracle’s purpose is not to be followed—it is to awaken. She is not here to be worshipped—but to ignite a flame in others that cannot be extinguished.

The oracle of this time does not seek disciples. She does not wish to be a figurehead, a guru, an authority espousing facile modalities and guaranteed healing. She is here to scatter the fire like glowing seeds. She intones the mantra, “You, too, can commune with the unseen.” 

What It Means to Be a Medium Now

So, what does it mean to be a medium, a channel, an oracle in this era? It means you are not a mouthpiece for divine dogma. It means you are not a servant of something outside yourself. It means you do not exist to be understood, validated, or made legible.

It means you take your place at the crossroads and keen your ears. You become the trembling reed that translates wind into wisdom. You let the unseen river have your tongue, yielding to the current that twines silence with song. You trust what arrives not as prophecy or omen, but as poetic refrain and lover. For what rises in you is no stranger; it is the contour of your own frequency returning, shaped by the looking glass of the world. We dwell in duality, yes, but in seduction rather than opposition. In the call and response of cosmos and soul. This is why the ancients conversed with questions—because gnosis was never a single flame, but the friction of two flints striking. Truth, like desire, needs an other to reveal itself.

To be an oracle today is to let the mystery breathe through you and give it form—not as doctrine, not as certainty, but as an unaccustomed luminosity in the darkness, as queerness, as fluidity, as the wild beast that refuses to be caged or subordinated.

You are not meant to carry answers in cupped hands, but to dance in the open palms of the questions—to let the mystery move through you: unbound, unnamed, perhaps a little tremulous...but willing all the same.

This is a talk I recently gave to one of the alumni groups for the incredible Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, which I completed in 2023. The topic of loneliness is one I ponder fairly frequently, being prone to spells of it that I can only describe as mental vertigo. But, as the talk demonstrates, there is a special quality within loneliness that we can learn to alchemize, and that can offer us unexpected paths to the connection we all want and deserve.

Clear light. Pure light. Rainbow light. The light that surpasses cognition. The light that disavows duality. The light that is not separate from darkness. How do we walk toward it? How do we recognize it? How does it change the way we see-hear-feel-think-sense-know?

Contemplate your typical associations with light. Are they of the “spiritual” garden variety? Do you use or routinely hear terms such as “love and light”? Do you see yourself as being of the light, or does that feel too abstract or out of context to you? Think about the necessity of light. Think about your own periods of “seeing the light.” Do you retreat from cosmic light, as described in the meditation? Or do you move toward it and recognize your identity within it? Let all of your thoughts coalesce before you move on to the writing exercise.

Writing Prompt: Respond to the following questions:

How does cosmic light express itself in me?

What is the source of my own light?

How does it manifest?

What does it feel like?

Alternatively, write your story of cosmic light. Imagine the moment you came into existence as you. Imagine that the cosmic light itself had a message for you. What was it?

Please enjoy this 9-minute meditation on self-love, inspired by Tara Well’s superb book, Mirror Meditation: The Power of Neuroscience and Self-Reflection to Overcome Criticism, Gain Confidence, and See Yourself with Compassion. Musical accompaniment, as always, is provided by my beloved, Shawn Feeney (shawnfeeney.com, https://www.instagram.com/shawnfeeney).

Please enjoy this month’s meditation on deeply listening and reattuning to ourselves. It includes sonic accompaniment from my husband, Shawn Feeney (website: shawnfeeney.com; Instagram: @shawnfeeney). I’m thrilled to share that we’ll be collaborating together on a series of monthly meditative livestreams, retreats, and other events—more to come in future newsletters.